Rite Stuff

To the Editors:

There is a component of the Darwinian explanation of religious
ritual that fairly shouts from Richard Sosis's excellent article
("The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual,"
March–April), and which he approaches tentatively at the end
without naming it: group selection. The hypothetical story is that
pre- and early historical human groups developed various internal,
"cultural" mechanisms and practices for rewarding behavior
beneficial to the group or punishing its absence, and some of these
mechanisms conferred survival advantage over other groups. Further,
the rewards and punishments meted out by such mechanisms naturally
produced selection pressure at the individual level within the
group: Individuals with inherent psychological tendencies consonant
with group practice would have a survival advantage over group
members without such tendencies. (And the effect of selection at the
individual level, the gradual preponderation of conforming
individuals within the group, would obviously feed back and
influence the development of the cultural mechanisms, in particular
making the system more robust.) Thus the modern proclivity toward
religious commitment may be one of those apparently inadaptive human
psychological traits, like the nearly universal willingness of young
men to go to war, that are hard-wired in human individuals, as the
result of a mere 200,000 years or less of evolution driven by
survival differentials among human groups.